Jack the lad sidesteps chance of more titles to live life to the max

THE great contradiction - it would seem from looking in from the outside - about Jack McCaffrey is that he is at once a young, slightly immature rascal while also being a wise old head, sensible beyond his years. A grownup kid, if you’ll allow the oxymoron.

Be that as it may, McCaffrey must the envy of just about every inter-county footballer out there, and not just because he has won All-Ireland medals, All Stars, and been honoured as Footballer of the Year. No, the dashing Dublin defender must be the envy of all because not only has he already a full and rounded life outside of football, but because he seems fully prepared to step off the inter-county hamster wheel and pursue other interests and live his life to the maximum.

McCaffrey’s decision to step away from the Dublin panel for the remainder of the year (at a minimum) might be for any number of reasons. He is, after all, a medical doctor working through a deadly virus pandemic, which may or may not have informed his decision. But remember this is a young man who walked away from a winning Dublin team in 2016 to travel to Africa and do some humanitarian work and see a bit of the world at an age when a lot of twenty-somethings do likewise. Not for the first time, the Dubliner seems willing and able to park the inter-county football part of his life and do other things.

And that’s the key point here: inter-county footballer is a part of McCaffrey’s life; it is not his whole life.

We’ve seen in the aftermath of those All-Ireland wins that McCaffrey is well able to enjoy himself, and he plays the game with a joie de vivre that not every county man displays. The Clontarf man really does seem to play the game for the full enjoyment of it, but as he’s said previously, Gaelic football is part of who he is, but it doesn’t define him.

Yes, he has a handful of medals and honours already won (which maybe makes these decisions a bit easier), but McCaffrey clearly feels a year or two or however long of doing other things in his life is more important and valuable to him than winning another Celtic cross or another All Star, if the personal sacrifice to attain those honours is deemed too much.

It goes without saying that his loss to the Dublin team will be huge, and that for all Dublin’s depth of playing resources, Dessie Farrell will find it nigh on impossible, for this season at least, to replace the jet-heeled half back like for like.

Dublin’s loss will, doubtless, be to McCaffrey’s personal gain, and isn’t that what this boils down to. There’s plenty of talk within the GAA about fostering a player’s well-being and personal development, and how the game itself does so much to enrich the lives of our young men and women - and it does that for sure - but it shouldn’t be lost on anyone, least of all other players, that one of the sport’s best, brightest, most successful and chilled out performers, still feels he needs to step away from the inter-county scene to enrich himself even further.